Comcast on Monday unveiled a virtualized network management system called Janus that aims to maximize its network efficiency and reliability.

According to Comcast, Janus does this by shifting the brunt of the company’s internet routing, switching and transport services to its edge cloud platforms.

“Data usage continues to skyrocket at unprecedented rates, primarily due to the rapid increase in streaming high-quality live sports,” Comcast chief network officer Elad Nafshi said in a memo. “Janus builds upon years of investment and innovation to maximize our network performance and will be a game-changer for our customers, our business, and the environment.”

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Comcast said the new organization of its networks will allow the company to keep up with the massive data traffic that fluctuates around live sports events.

In addition to enhanced network performance, Janus can self-diagnose functionality issues through a real-time telemetry algorithm and offload processing onto redundant, intact network pathways.

That means that in most cases of weather or accidental damage, Janus is capable of restoring service through backup network connections.

Comcast also said that Janus would help the company achieve its goal of being carbon-neutral by 2035.

Since the initiative’s computing platforms would be switched from traditional network facilities to cloud-based platforms, their environmental impact should be significantly reduced.

Initial trials for Janus are underway at Comcast’s network hub in Atlanta, with wide-scale rollout expected in 2025.

Cable techies are looking around "the fog."

At a Silicon Valley conference early this month, computer and communications experts delved into the IoT and "the fog," a derivative of cloud computing. CableLabs is evaluating the fog's role, especially in emerging wireless services, and Comcast awarded an "Innovation Fund" grant recently to a Princeton University "Cloud to Fog" research project. 

"Fog is 'distributed cloud,'" according to Don Clarke, principal architect at CableLabs, who noted that the concept emerged a couple years ago as a Cisco marketing term. Other experts acknowledged that "fog" and "edge" are often used interchangeably, but they are synergistic – not synonymous.

In a seminal academic paper on "The Fog Computing Paradigm" three years ago, Ivan Stojmenovic and Sheng Wen of Deakin University in Australia described scenarios in which fog services "can be hosted at end devices such as set-top boxes or access points."

By the researchers' reckoning the fog lies between the cloud and the edge. Fog computing is envisioned for use in wireless services, including mobile voice, Internet of Things and connectivity for autonomous vehicles and other new networks.

"Fog can be distinguished from cloud by its proximity to end users ... and its support for mobility," Stojmenovic and Wen wrote. "As fog computing is implemented at the edge of the network, it provides low latency, location awareness and improves quality-of-services for streaming and real-time applications."

Major developments have been taking place quietly since the paper's publication. The 400 attendees at the Fog World Congress in Santa Clara, Calif., Oct. 31-Nov. 1 examined evolving trends in fog computing, including increasing deployments of fog as an early-stage technology and as a solution to Internet of Things latency.

For example, at a session titled "Fog Over Denver," Traci Hiltonberry, director of innovation for the Denver South Economic Development Partnership, explained the creation of a "national model for fog computing and networking in a smart city ... [for] transportation and mobility, public safety, resilience and resource conservation, smart buildings and public health."

Another speaker forecast that fog computing will become an $18.2 billion market by 2022. Christian Renaud, research director-IoT at 451 Research, predicted that fog's primary uses will be in the utilities and energy sectors, followed by transportation, healthcare and industrial. He said he foresees revenue models growing by 37% from 2018 to 2022.

Meanwhile: Fog Forming in the Cable Industry
The potential for this "fog" capability at the network edge is on the minds of several cable operators, although they declined to provide status reports or timetables for implementing the architecture.

"The edge is the new piece of the cloud puzzle," CableLab's Clarke told Multichannel News. He said that identifying "latency and bandwidth efficiency between the cloud and the end user" is a critical issue in edge development.

"It's about relationships," he said, noting that there are "very different dynamics" as various sectors in the network operations business explore "how standards and open-source can become symbiotic."

Clarke said the "edge is where the connectivity provides the latency you need for the service experience," citing issues such as "where does that service terminate and where does the content get delivered?" He eschewed the word "fog," focusing instead on edge computing.

"These days you can put a lot of functionality [into] base station and other less complex, lower power consumption" devices, he said.

"Wireless is an important consideration as we architect these new networks at 5G [fifth generation] and beyond," Clarke said.

Meanwhile, Comcast said that with its grant -- of an unspecified sum -- to the Princeton University project, the company sought to support research into the "cloud-to-fog interface in the areas of storage, communications and management."

In announcing the grant, Jason Livingood, VP-technology policy & standards at Comcast Cable, called fog networking "an architectural approach that seeks to make networks more efficient by pushing network intelligence and processing capabilities closer to end users." Livingood said that fog computing processes would enable the "cloud and edge [to] form a mutually beneficial, interdependent continuum" that would eliminate or minimize the need to determine if a specific task should be handled in the cloud or at a customer's edge device.

"This project highlights the challenges and solution approaches in building a unified interface framework between edge and cloud under the fog-networking paradigm," Livingood said. A Comcast spokesman told Multichannel News that there is no specific timetable for a report on the Princeton research; he characterized the fog exploration as "pretty new."

At Princeton, the project is being supervised by Dr. Mung Chiang, an electrical engineering professor, founder of the Princeton EDGE Lab and a co-founder of the global Open Fog Consortium. Among the supporters of Princeton's EDGE Lab are ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft.

Chiang has said he helped launch the consortium to address common problems with “edge networks” — the connections at the periphery of a more centralized network, close to the actual devices that use the network. In a Princeton profile of his work, Chiang said, “As we further develop the ‘Internet of Things’ — networked devices in smart cities or connected cars — we have a unique opportunity to bring the ‘cloud’ closer to the edge and users as ‘fog.’”

Photo by d3sign/Getty Images

Cisco Systems is shoring up its cloud platform by putting up $260 million for CliQr, a privately held company that has developed a cloud orchestration platform for virtualized environments.

Cisco said it has already integrated CliQr with a number of its data center switching and cloud platforms, including Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure and its Unified Computing System.

Cisco believes  the acquisition of the San Jose-based company and its CloudCenter platform will help its customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

CliQr’s platform, Cisco added, will help its customers create a single application profile across data centers and public or private clouds.

Cisco said the CliQr team will join its Insieme Business Unit, reporting to Prem Jain, the unit’s senior vice president and general manager. Cisco expects to close the deal in its fiscal third quarter.

"Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds," said Rob Salvagno, vice president, Cisco Corporate Development, in a statement. "With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment."

Cisco Systems has dipped into the M&A pool again, this time pulling out MaintenanceNet, a privately held company that markets a cloud-based platform that uses data analytics and automation to track, manage and renew customer contracts.

Cisco will pay $139 million in cash and retention based incentives to acquire MaintenanceNet, and expects to complete the deal during the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2016, Debbie Dunnam, Cisco’s SVP of global customer success, noted in this blog post detailing the deal.

The acquisition follows a business history between the two companies. Since 2009, Cisco and MaintenanceNet have worked together to offer Cisco distribution and reseller partners an automated way to “improve service renewals and identify uncovered product opportunities,” Dunnam explained, noting that the solution enables automated quoting, notifications, and, ordering online.

Once the deal is closed, MaintenanceNet will join Cisco’s Global Customer Success (GCS) organization.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based MaintenanceNet was founded in 2004.

ActiveVideo Networks has struck a deal with TransGaming that will enable ActiveVideo to offer a slate of on-demand games via its cloud-based platform to pay-TV partners worldwide.

Under the deal, ActiveVideo use its CloudTV software platform to offer GameTree TV and its set of premium games to set-top boxes and IP-connected devices. ActiveVideo claims that its CloudTV platform has already delivered more than 500 million game sessions, with engagement times in the neighborhood of 30 minutes per session.

Transgaming claims that GameTree TV already has a total addressable market of more than 60 million homes worldwide, as it’s already available through existing partnerships with Dish Network and DirecTV, FREE, Air Tel and Reliance.

The agreement with ActiveVideo should help Transgaming expand that pie. ActiveVideo said it expects operator deployments to start in early 2015, noting that its existing customers represent more than 15 million set-top boxes and connected devices. ActiveVideo’s customers include Cablevision Systems, Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom, Charter Communications, Grande Communications and Time Warner Cable. Comcast has been working with ActiveVideo on a VOD interface trial for QAM-only boxes.

 “This strategic partnership with ActiveVideo is an important milestone in the broad scale delivery of video games through TransGaming’s GameTree TV platform since it immediately brings us many major operator opportunities,” said Vikas Gupta, CEO & President, TransGaming, in a statement.

 “With rapid evolutions in device ecosystems, fragmentation in new or existing set-tops has historically prevented pay-TV operators from monetizing gaming opportunities at scale,” added Murali Nemani, CMO, ActiveVideo. “CloudTV introduces a new paradigm that unlocks the global potential of rich HTML5 casual gaming libraries on any STB or connected device, regardless of local device resources.”

You’ve no doubt heard quite a lot about how “the cloud” will revolutionize the way operators do business and you may be skeptical about whether the results will live up to the lofty goals. The reality is that the cloud is already living up to the hype and it is indeed poised to enable operators to do a lot more in the future.

Comcast and Cablevision Systems — cable’s “early adopters” of the cloud — are currently expanding their cloud digital video recorder services, and other operators are in various stages of evaluating and testing their own cloud DVRs. While initially touted primarily as a cost-effective way to offer network DVR services, it has quickly become apparent that having content reside in the cloud enables the delivery of a better DVR service.

For example, whereas set-top box-based DVRs can simultaneously record only as many programs as they have tuners, cloud DVRs open up the gates for much more flexibility. This can be structured to extend revenue to the operator by charging for levels of service for recording, storage and device delivery. Spain-based broadband provider Telefónica believes the subscriber benefits of its popular cloud DVR service are behind the substantial reductions in subscriber churn it is experiencing.

Reduced subscriber churn is a benefit that clearly every operator can understand and appreciate. 

The cloud has been widely deployed for providing complex search and recommendations based on user behavioral data, which also drives up operator revenue through VOD sales. Cloud UI solutions help preserve legacy set-top boxes in the home and keep the price down for new boxes. Features for shopping, applications and advertising all depend on cloud-based technology. These all expand service-based revenue and often drive down capital expenditures.

Additionally, with more and more programming content now residing in the cloud, operators can take advantage of Internet-protocol content delivery to HDMI dongles and other emerging customer premises equipment (CPE). Unlike traditional set-tops, these devices are much smaller, portable and consume much less power, enabling operators to deliver more services in the home and on the go.

Paradigm shift is an overused phrase, but it is applicable when it comes to the cloud. It is affecting virtually every facet of a service provider’s operations, from the headend to the back office, where operators can consider virtualizing their complete user administrative infrastructure with a flexible, scalable solution managed with open-source tools. And again, we have yet to tap its full potential.

The cloud does not just represent a better, lower-cost method to accomplish what was done before. It can dramatically change how the industry operates by improving efficiencies and enabling exciting new services.

Susan Crouse is director of product marketing at Broomfield, Colo.-based video set-top software and middleware maker and technology integration services provider Alticast.